"FRANCE:
HUNTING THE ALMASTY"Three articles on this page
Almasty International

27 June 1992 -- They're off to find the
Almasty - a big, hairy, two-legged creature living in the Caucasus mountains.
More than 500 eyewitness accounts of these beasties are said to exist. Local
people claim to have fed, touched, and even - on rare occasions - had sex
with them.

Now a Franco-Russian expedition, "Almasty '92", wants to get hard
scientific proof of their existence. Adult Almasties, it is said, stand about
2 metres (6.5 feet) high. Their arms reach down to their knees, their legs
are short and their dark-skinned bodies are covered with coarse, long, reddish-brown
hair. The females have long, narrow breasts, which they sometimes throw over
their shoulders. Locals say they are nomadic and nocturnal, sleeping by day
in caves, stables, abandoned huts or nests made from broken branches in trees.
They are said to communicate by booming like bitterns. Until fairly recently,
Almasties were unknown to the wider world. Publicity surrounding the Anglo-American
search for the Himalayan Yeti in 1956 persuaded the Caucasians, who had previously
thought their shaggy anthropoid to be of little interest, to inform the authorities.

The Soviet Academy of Sciences mounted an expedition in 1958, but failed to
find its quarry. It did, however, stimulate the curiosity of Marie-Jeanne
Koffmann, a French-born surgeon and mountaineer, who had served as an army
officer in the Caucasus during the Second World War. She set off to the Caucasus
on her own, returning with 40 eyewitness accounts, a fascination with cryptozoology
(the study of unknown animal species) and a determination to settle the issue
once and for all. With Sylvain Pallix, a journalist and film producer, Dr
Koffmann has at last been given her chance. At the age of 72 she is to lead
a team of ten Russian and four French scientists.

Mr. Pallix will record their achievements - and, he hopes, their quarry -
on film. Their aim is to get close enough to an Almasty to be able to anaesthetize
it and take skin, blood, and saliva samples. They also hope to fit their guest
with a radio-transmitting bracelet to track its movements. Skeptics fear Dr
Koffmann may be disappointed. They point out that, although molds of what
is claimed to be an Almasty foot print have been taken, no corpses or skeletons
have ever been found. And not all that the locals say about the beast is entirely
convincing: glowing eyes, for instance, are rare among primates. Besides,
even if the Almasty did exist, it might be on the verge of extinction. Sightings,
once fairly frequent, are now rare. The most recent was claimed in August
last year by Gregory Pantchenko, a Russian zoologist and one of the expedition's
members. He says he watched an Almasty for a minute and a half from about
4 meters away one moonlit night. Unfortunately - you guessed - his camera
had no flash. Credit:
Paul Cropper

Boom, boom, boom. These
conversational tones of the elusive Alma, a species of retarded Neanderthal
man, will reverberate around the world if a Franco-Russian expedition succeeds
in its mission this summer to capture a cousin of the Yeti, Abominable Snowman
and Bigfoot in the remote Caucasus mountains of Kazakhstan. Leading the hunt
is Marie-Jeanne Koffmann, a 73-year-old doctor who has collected 500 eyewitness
accounts of the mythical creature during her 20 years of traversing the sparsely
populated wastes of Kabardin-Balkar by horse and jeep. Always one step behind
her quarry, she has taken impressions of their huge footprints and studied
their voluminous droppings. Her quest has been given fresh impetus by the
claim of her colleague, Gregori Patchenkoff, that he observed an Alma in the
same region for six minutes last August. "Its appearance corresponded
exactly to that of other witnesses," Sylvain Pallix, organiser of the
Alma 92 Expedition, said last week. "It was a big primate, a biped that
walked perfectly on two feet. It was 5ft 8in-6ft 6in, covered with reddish
fur about 6in long. Its face was a mixture of an ape's and Neanderthal man's.
"It had to swivel its whole body to turn its head. Patchenkoff found
it in a sheepfold where horses were kept. Almas are attracted to horses because
they love to make little braids in their manes. Unfortunately, he didn't have
a camera." According to Dr. Koffmann, Almas are in the habit of raiding
shepherds' huts for food scraps and clothes, which they sometimes wear even
though well insulated with fur. This apparent "aping" of human behavior
could explain the mysterious disappearance of two ski sticks from Chris Bonnington's
controversial Yeti expedition to Tibet in 1988. Yet the Alma has no need of
such aids to assist its flight from man. If local peasants are to be believed,
it is capable of bursts of speed approaching 40mph on its short legs, carrying
a heavily muscled body that can exceed 440lb in a fully grown adult. Its newborn
young, according to one witness's testimony printed last June in the magazine
Archaeologia, "were exactly like human babies, except that they were
smaller. They had pink skin, like human infants, exactly the same head, the
same arms and legs. Not hairy." The Alma reportedly mumbles "boom,
boom, boom", although Jimmy Tarbuck punchlines are not widespread in
the Caucuses. Nomadic, omnivorous and shy, it has reflecting eyes conforming
to its mainly nocturnal activity. It lives at heights of 8,000-12,000ft, descending
to pillage crops and sometimes seeking refuge at much higher levels, Koffmann
claims. All of which adds up to an abominable task for the hunters. The £1m
expedition will therefore be carrying a technological panoply which includes
infra-red cameras, miniature helicopter "drones" containing cameras,
motorized hang-gliders, four-wheel vehicles and motorbikes. Their most important
piece of equipment is a gun, which fires hypodermic darts. "Our aim is
to capture an Alma with the help of the local population," Pallix said.
"We want to take a mold of its face, specimens of its hair, skin and
blood all kinds of proof which would be of scientific importance and then
set it free with a radio tracer band. There is going to be no King Kong spectacle
of bringing it back." But the most likely product of the venture is a
film that Pallix, a 33-year-old freelance journalist and documentary director,
aims to make of the area and the endeavors of the 10-strong scientific team.
Pallix maintains that French money and technology will permit Koffmann, a
Franco-Russian surgeon, alpinist and founder of Russian cryptozoology, to
accomplish what the former Soviet Union's scarce resources so long denied
her. His enthusiasm contrasted with the skepticism of Dr Myra Shackley, once
Britain's leading authority on Almas and professor of archeology at Leicester
University. She has abandoned her research, which took her to Mongolia in
1969.

"I dropped it because
of all the flak I got," she said last week. "I got rather tired
of being called a lunatic. Because it attracts amateurs on the fringes of
respectable sciences, one cannot be treated seriously by anybody." She
grew more skeptical of the Almas' existence. "There was an extraordinary
body of folklore, but the bottom line was that not a single piece of hard
evidence existed. Unless you have one decent photo you won't get anywhere."
She fears the Franco-Russian venture may be doomed to similar disappointment.
"The larger the expedition, the more unlikely it is to find anything.
But Dr Koffmann is the Grande dame of the Caucasus Almas, and I wish her the
best of luck."

Sources:SUNDAY TIMES 29/3/92

11 March 1992

FRANCE:
FRENCH, RUSSIANS TO HUNT CAUCASIAN "YETI".

PARIS, March 11, Reuters
- Scientists are to hunt for a mysterious creature sighted in the Caucasian
mountains which could be an ancestor of man, the French leader of the expedition
said on Wednesday. Marie-Jeanne Koffman, a French doctor living in Moscow
who will lead the Franco-Russian party next July, said she had gathered 500
sightings of the Almasty, a tall, hairy, stooping creature. Like its Himalayan
cousin, the Yeti, a specimen has never been captured. "It could be an
ancestor of man," Koffman told radio France Info.

French anthropologist
Yves Coppens said he believed the Almasty, if it really existed, was a big
ape. But he said it might also be a primitive human being cut off from developing
genetic changes. The scientists, who hope to take the first photographs of
the Almasty, will be equipped with an ultra-light aircraft and a camera-carrying
helicopter.

Sources: REUTERS NEWS
SERVICE

30 January 1992

RUSSIA:

ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN
BREAK INTO RUSSIAN BARRACKS - RADIO. MOSCOW, Jan 30, Reuters - Two
abominable snowmen have been seen breaking into a military builders' barracks
in a northern Russian town, Moscow radio said on Thursday. About 30 people
watched as the snowmen entered the barracks in the town of Kargupol, it said. "One was two meters tall (seven feet) and the second was probably a young
one, approximately a meter tall", the radio said. Tufts of fur were later
discovered on the barbed wire protecting the unit's perimeter. The radio gave
no details of what the snowmen did inside the barracks or when the incident
took place. There have been many reported sightings in Russia of such fur-covered
creatures, which resemble descriptions from Tibet of the mysterious yeti and
from North America of the so-called "Bigfoot", but there is no firm
scientific proof of their existence. Russian newspapers often publish stories
about landings by spacemen and other mysterious phenomena.